Breaking Away Read online

  I’m telling my story to encourage parents to take time to analyze how they are raising their children. A lot of reasonable people do unreasonable things. Sometimes they have lapses. Parents who want to motivate their kids will cross a line and end up punishing them instead. This book isn’t a manual by any stretch—I’m not an expert qualified to tell parents how to raise their kids. I’m a survivor of exactly how not to raise a kid. I hope that parents who read my story will recognize when they’re pushing their kids too hard, like I was pushed. I hope they’ll know when to back off rather than risk doing damage to their children’s psyches and destroying their families. If just one parent, just one reasonable person, knows to lighten up because of reading this book, then telling my story will have been worthwhile.

  I’m also telling my story so that adults will be able to spot red flags, to identify kids who might be victims of abuse by parents or guardians. I expect that people who read this book will realize that being able to pick out the boy or girl at risk is only the first step. They’ll know that they have to act; that the bar isn’t set at proof conclusive but rather strong suspicion; that the onus should be on the witness to report to authorities; and that there should be zero tolerance, no waiting for the abuse to happen again. I understand why people aren’t inclined to act: they base their decisions on the context they know, how their own parents raised them. They presume that all others have the same common sense and common decency. Reading my story, they’ll realize that those qualities aren’t quite as common as they think. If this book encourages just one adult to report an incident of abuse when he or she might have otherwise stood by silently, if just one boy or girl is spared any physical or psychological harm because a reader of this book better understands the stakes involved, then telling my story will have been worthwhile.

  And finally, I’m telling my story for sons and daughters who endured continual torment like I did. Like I said, I know I’m not alone. They’re out there. They could have been kids who were athletes like I was. They could have been music prodigies. They could have been gifted in any number of ways. And because of their exceptional gifts, parents pushed them to unacceptable lengths. Maybe the parents did it out of greed, hoping to cash in on their kids’ gifts. Maybe they did it because their kids’ successes were a vicarious way of making up for their own failures. Maybe they did it because of mental illness. All are true in my case. If this book spurs them to seek professional help to heal the damage like I did, then putting it all down on the page will have been worthwhile.

  part two

  4

  THE O’SULLIVANS

  To tell my story, I have to start with the story of my father and his parents.

  John O’Sullivan was born in England in February 1960. He was the oldest son of Bernard and Florence, immigrants who came to Canada in the mid-sixties and settled in a blue-collar neighborhood in the sprawling Toronto suburb of Scarborough. Bernard was calm, reserved, even gentlemanly. He had short gray hair and glasses and seemed to want to blend into the background. Physically, though, he was a presence—thick chested, maybe a bit over six feet tall and around 240 pounds. He towered over his wife. Florence was a stay-at-home mom to my father, his younger brother, Barry, and their little sister, Donna. She had to go it alone raising the brood. She and my grandfather came to Canada on their own, with no extended family here. There was no clan, no big family for get-togethers.

  From what I knew of them and what I was told by my father, Bernard and Florence weren’t particularly social, either. They didn’t mix with their neighbors in any way, didn’t attend church, didn’t belong to any clubs.

  Bernard worked at the Coca-Cola plant in Toronto. He was a lifer who punched the clock, who worked this single job from his arrival in Canada until his retirement. He had no close friends from his workplace, but the nature of the labor would have had something to do with that—production-line drudgery that he’d just want to escape. Socializing with guys from the plant would only remind you of the grind that awaited you when it was time to punch in again. He would have a drink now and then. I suspect there was a time when he did a bit more than that, and he wouldn’t have been the only guy who had a bottle to keep him company through the workday.

  The one thing that stands out for me about my grandparents was something that I had just heard about over the years. At some point before I was born, Florence had at least a couple of nervous breakdowns. At least that’s how they labeled it. I suspect that she wasn’t clinically diagnosed with any particular condition and didn’t receive much in the way of treatment, if anything at all. At the time she would have felt too much stigma to seek out professional help. Typical of her time, I suppose. And in the years after that, too much shame would have been risked to discuss it openly in front of her grandchildren. I guess that’s understandable, avoiding the subject being their way of coping. So I have no idea if she had some sort of emotional crisis that set her down a very dark road. It could have been postpartum depression. It could have been stress about her kids. It could have been loneliness. It could have been any of these things or dozens more, any combination or nothing at all. She might have just been disposed to anxiety. I’m sure that Bernard would have been sympathetic and supportive even if he didn’t fully understand exactly what she was going through. By the time I came along, it seemed to have passed and she seemed reasonable happy.

  From what I could tell, Bernard and Florence weren’t neglectful parents, but they weren’t overly involved or overtly loving. They provided for their kids, putting a roof over their heads and clothes on their backs but offering nothing in the way of extravagances. They wished for the best for their kids but let them find their own way and fend for themselves, all in the cause of developing their independence.

  It’s not surprising, then, that even as a teenager, my father considered himself his own creation. Not an inheritor. Not a chip off the old block. No, he considered himself his own man. Where my grandfather’s accent had faded and he had come to think of himself as a Canadian, my father embraced his Irish roots and the notion of his tribe being warriors by nature. He was a disagreeable, defiant kid, looking for a fight rather than for a way to avoid one. He joined a boxing gym, hit the heavy bag and sparred, not so much to blow off steam as to get in his licks. He was a decent student, quick to pick things up but with no academic ambitions, but did more than enough to graduate even with spending the bare minimum of time on his schoolwork. School was a low priority because it had no impact on what he envisioned his career was going to be: professional hockey. From the time that he came to Canada and put on skates in house league, he was bound and determined to play in the NHL, to make pro money, to win fame and live a far better life than his father’s. That he was just one of a million Canadian kids thinking the same didn’t matter to him. If just one kid was going to make it, it was going to be him. That he had a late start in the game didn’t matter either. He could make up for lost time just by putting in more hours every day. He believed that he wanted it more than anyone else and that that would be enough to get him to the Show. The first half of that proposition might have been true; the second, not even close.

  5

  MY FATHER’S (NOT SO GLORIOUS) CAREER

  My father played youth-league hockey in Toronto, but not with the top organizations and not in the tiers with the most talent. In his day, the Metro Toronto Hockey League was the world’s largest hockey organization, with 30,000 players. It was far easier to get into the most exclusive private school than it was to make the Toronto Marlies or one of the other triple-A teams in any age group. If your marks weren’t solid enough, you could buy your way into a school, but if you couldn’t keep up on the ice, there was no way that you were going to make it with one of the elite teams. And in the Toronto area, the players who moved to major junior, the NHL track, came exclusively from those top AAA programs.

  My father had no doubts about his ability. He believed he was as good as anyone he was on the ice with and that
no one out there matched him for toughness or will. Still, he never made it onto one of the triple-A teams. He figured that he got too late of a start, which might have been a factor, and that he didn’t have the family connections that other players did, which wouldn’t have been a factor at all. On both counts it was a way he could scapegoat Bernard for his own failures.

  Back in ’77, my father turned sixteen and became eligible for the Ontario Hockey Association’s entry draft (the league is now known as the OHL). Teams had their scouts out looking for talent all season long and had a network of insiders across the province. Talented players didn’t fly under their radar. Three hundred players from across the province were selected. My father wasn’t one of them.

  Despite the overwhelming odds against it, my father assumed that every team in the league had made a terrible mistake and began calling them up for a tryout as a walk-on.

  My father never told me all the details, but I know how it would have played out. He would have had to get a general manager on the phone and convince him that he wasn’t wasting his time. The GM would have been skeptical, and for good reason—the odds of drafted players making the team were already long. Competing against players two and three years older than them, fewer than one hundred of those draftees would make the rosters of the OHA’s twelve teams. Every team blew off my father’s cold calls that season. The next year he called around again and one team invited him in for a tryout.

  The Brantford Alexanders were the worst team in the OHA—the worst by far. They won only twenty-three of sixty-eight games. How much my father played with the Alexanders is anybody’s guess, but it certainly wasn’t a lot. He might have been on the roster but didn’t skate in a game. He might have only made it into an exhibition game. Brantford’s records for that season are incomplete, but statistics show up for players who made it into as few as three games. If my father had scored a goal or recorded an assist or even taken a penalty, it would show up. He couldn’t have stayed there long before he was released. I’ve talked to a couple of players from that team and they had no memory of him whatsoever.

  When the last-place team has no use for you, not even as a little-used guy at the end of the bench, you’d think that you had exhausted your options, that it was time to turn the page. He could have kept on playing hockey in a lesser league, a recreational league, and taken a job or gone back to school. But he wasn’t going to let go. My father was a glutton for rejection.

  In the Canadian major junior leagues, you are pretty well stuck with your region of origin. Kids in Ontario, like my father, play in the Ontario league. Kids in Quebec and points east wind up in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. Kids west of Ontario end up in the Western Hockey League. There are few exceptions, mostly elite kids who moved away from home at a young age to play for top teams. Even fewer kids jump from one league to another. It’s a mark of my father’s desperation to play—and his frustrations—that he wounded up playing in all three major junior leagues. I don’t know of anybody else in the modern history of the sport in Canada who could make that claim. It’s like getting thrown out of two Ivy League schools and then getting accepted by a third. You know there’s a story there.

  It started in the east.

  My father had to get a release from the Alexanders and receive an exemption from the QMJHL, permitting him to play in Quebec after time in the OHA. That might explain why his name is scrubbed from existing records with Brantford—any verifiable appearances in games could have made him ineligible to play in the Q. He landed with the Hull Olympiques, an even worse team than Brantford in an even weaker league: just ten wins in seventy-two games. Records show that he played eight games in Hull, picking up two goals and an assist. Not a bad line of numbers, but not enough for the Olympiques to hold on to him. They traded him to the Shawinigan Cataractes, the second-worst team in the Quebec league. Again, he found it tough to get into the lineup, picking up no goals and just three assists in six games. It’s not clear if he made it through the season, but probably not. Shawinigan didn’t bring him back for the next season.

  That type of rejection would crush anyone else, but my father wouldn’t take no or even non for an answer.

  The following fall, my father had to petition the Western Hockey League for a chance to play. At this point he would have been honing his skills as a negotiator if not as a hockey player. Again he managed to persuade a team, the Saskatoon Blades, to give him a shot. There were two WHL teams worse than Saskatoon that season, but one of them, the Great Falls Americans, folded before Christmas.

  I hope you’ll never know and can only imagine my father’s desperation at this point. Like he had in the Quebec league, he managed to get into a handful of games with Saskatoon. Unlike his previous stops along the way, he managed to get into a couple of fights in games. It’s easy to picture how that came about. Dropping the gloves with an opponent has been almost a form of initiation in the WHL. He would have been making his bones by fighting. He also might have been trying to win a spot with his fists in the lineup, as a goon. Though he had spent years in the gym and had been in dozens of fights in the streets, trying to be an enforcer would have been a last resort for him—he thought of himself as a skilled player, despite evidence to the contrary. His thinking: if he won a spot with the team as a brawler, it would only be a matter of time before they recognized he could do so much more than that.

  It didn’t get far. He stuck with the Blades a few weeks and was released. His junior career was over.

  Defeat like this would have sucked the ambition out of 99 percent of junior hockey players. Many who’ve had success also know when they’ve gone as far as they can. My father was, of course, in that 1 percent who can’t accept the unanimous opinion of coaches and managers who have spent years in the game. He knew better. He believed he had a future in the game even if there was abundant evidence that he didn’t even have a present.

  * * *

  My father lasted a couple of days in the Winnipeg Jets’ training camp in the fall of ’81. He didn’t have a chance to win a job. No one in his position would have. He was just one of dozens of spare bodies that showed up when camp opened. The players who are going to be on the NHL roster know that going in. Everybody in camp does. It doesn’t sound like much, but this would turn out to be the highlight of his hockey career—getting to skate through drills with a bunch of NHLers.

  Maybe my father thought he could compete for a spot with the Jets’ CHL affiliate in Tulsa. He’d have been just about the only one who thought that. Players on the Tulsa Oilers had been all-stars with the major junior teams that had cut my father loose or that wouldn’t even give him a tryout. I’ll never know how he talked his way into an invitation to the Jets’ camp—it’s not like he had an agent out there making his case for him. If a guy with my father’s credentials can talk his way into all three major junior leagues and then into an NHL camp, he should be a salesman, not a hockey player. But that’s where his powers of persuasion ran out: he couldn’t talk his way into anything more than that.

  To stick around in pro hockey, he had to lower his sights as low as they could go: the Atlantic Coast Hockey League, the bottom of professional hockey’s food chain.

  The ACHL has been out of business for twenty-five years now, and only a few diehard fans in the Carolinas and Virginia, where the teams were based, would have noticed. The ACHL was way below the American Hockey League, the waiting room for those almost ready for the NHL or the last stop for those who barely miss making the grade. The ACHL was way below the International Hockey League, where one or two players on a roster might have a slim chance of making their way to the NHL. The ACHL was below the Central Hockey League, where teams might have a player who spent some time in the NHL and was holding on, almost always in vain, for a chance to make it back. All that is to say that the only thing between my father and the NHL was seven hundred other players.

  The ACHL took pro hockey to grungy little arenas in Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas
, markets where hockey was a novelty sport, where the audience couldn’t tell the difference between the NHL and the most watered-down minor-league product. ACHL teams offered players season-long contracts at just a bit better than subsistence living, not even three hundred bucks a week. Your typical ACHL player would share an apartment with a teammate or two, would have a bit of drinking money and on road trips would try to stretch his daily ten bucks in meal money. It was a young man’s league, where it was hard to find a twenty-five-year-old in a dressing room.

  My father didn’t even get a season-long contract in the ACHL.

  As you’d expect, turnover was pretty high in the ACHL, guys deciding on a daily basis that all the work and physical risk just weren’t worth it anymore. To try to fill those always-opening spots, my father jumped from team to team on tryouts for five-game contracts. He was never in one place long enough to rent an apartment, so he lived out of his suitcase in motels. If he could remember all the places he played, all the tryouts he had, no one else could. Like that blank space beside his name in the Brantford Alexanders’ records, the gaps in my father’s CV do show up in hockey databases.

  He started out with the Baltimore Skipjacks in the fall of ’81. Dave Herbst, then a veteran forward with the Skipjacks, says my father was “a hockey drifter” who rubbed his teammates the wrong way right from the start. “We were a loose bunch and liked to have a good time,” Herbst says. “Guys hung out together. We knew who we were, just young guys who liked to play hockey and pretty well had gone as far as we could go. We still liked to have fun. Then this guy came in and was taking everything so seriously, didn’t have the time of day for anybody. Maybe on some teams the veterans didn’t get close to the guys on the five-game contracts because you were just going to have to say ‘See you later’ to them at some point, but we weren’t like that. But this guy had attitude and took things way more seriously than we did, like he was going to steal our jobs. And that was never going to happen.”